Basically an Octopus grabs an eagle which is a peculiar sight and the people intervene and free the bird brain. Would you intervene or let nature take its course?
I feel I would have watched what happened, I’m not so sure the Eagle wouldn’t have won in the end with his talons and beak but who knows.
Emotionally though I can see why I might jump in and free the mighty eagle.
I almost always side with the predators they are so rarely successful in their kills to take one away is cruelty in the highest degree. The octopus earned his meal let him eat it.
I think everyone’s a winner here. That’s a pretty big octopus and the eagle was clearly going to drown rather than chow down, the eagle doesn’t know what’s good for it as…without being too dismissive, it is as thick as pig-shit. Corvids and octopus? smart creatures, Raptors? nah, not so much and we sometimes have to save it from itself. At least it had the decency to look pretty sheepish at the end of it.
Huh, my original post was going to say that I’d help the eagle, but solely because they’re endangered. I’d have let the octopus have a crow or pigeon or Canada goose (I’d cheer the last one). But it turns out that the bald eagle is now “least concern”, so yeah, let the octopus have its dinner.
And no way the eagle was going to escape. It’s out of its own environment, and octopi are pretty fearsome predators. Have we forgotten the time an octopus ate a shark?
Lots of different possible outcomes: the octopus may get tired and let the eagle go all on its own. The eagle manages to drag the octopus to land and the octopus lets go. The octopus wears the eagle down, and the eagle drowns.
So the question is: if it was a sea gull, would you still interfere to free it ? Or if bald eagles are endangered, does saving this one really make a difference ? (if so, should we be protecting them from all other natural predators out there ?)
Well, the Eagle would have gotten away as I fished that Octopus out to make myself some killer sushi, but otherwise I would have let nature takes it course. That bird was done for.
Eagles are magnificent creatures whose survival is in peril, so I definitely would have intervened in the Eagle’s favor. To answer Cormac, I would not intervene to save a Sea Gull. They are scavengers of whom I hold little regard.
Meh, didn’t look like much of a fight was going on, I might have waited it out. Didn’t look like the octopus had much chance of dragging the eagle under, I’ve got 5 bucks on stalemate.
I think this is almost certainly correct - there’s no other way an octopus gets hold of an eagle.
As a species, Bald Eagles are no longer in difficulty, and there’s nothing really wrong with the Bald Eagle gene pool digesting the message that octopodes are not choice prey. But I feel there’s a decent case for separating the two and letting each go on its way.
I kind of feel sorry for octopodes. Most octopus species are semelparous, meaning they die after mating, although the females usually live long enough to tend their eggs. Eagles have a fair chance at doing it more than once.